A first impression of ripple

This is a guest post by Bjorn43 originally posted on Crypto LA.

Ripple. What a name. It makes you think about throwing a rock in the pond and watching the little circles of waves rushing to shore and returning to the middle. If there was no shore, the ripples would continue around the world just like the concept that Ripple Labs is working on with their internet protocol for moving cryptocurrencies around the world.

Hi, my name is Bjorn. I am totally new to this game. I saw an article a few weeks ago that mentioned Ripple Labs and digital currencies. I googled “Ripple” and ended up on their website and found it informative and easy to read.
I liked the comparison to email, and that it is an open-source protocol to move currencies just like email moves documents. I also like the fact that it does it at a cost that is next to nothing and keeps it simple, performing transactions in seconds instead of days

When you read the articles at Ripple.com and when you see the investors involved, you get a feeling that this is not a fly by night outfit but actually an entity that is serious about changing the way business is done on a global scale. That is no small feat. It requires that a lot of people and financial institutions get on board. Financial institutions in particular may not be that easy, but it seems that Ripple labs may have some fine people to do that job.

We should be able to get people on board as long as we tell everybody about it, and how they can join and they do the same. We can create our own ripple effect. I joined a few days ago by getting a wallet and activating it. It was a little frustrating to get a wallet. I don’t know if it was the web site or if it was my computer but when I clicked on the wallet in the upper right hand corner, the page turned gray and nothing happened. Finally, I gave up and went to bed. The next day I tried again, though, and everything went fine.

To activate my wallet, I joined XRPtalk and had to jump through a couple of small hoops to get 25 XRP for free to activate the wallet (and I mean small hoops, just create an avatar and say a little about myself). It’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is to get all the people you know to join in, and here is where you may come up against a small problem.

It is a problem of perception that actually contains two problems. First, digital currency itself is something people haven’t heard of or think is a fad that will go away. Second, they may have heard the negative publicity around Bitcoin and think that it’s only criminals who use it to hide their money. So you may have to try to convince them to at least take a look at the web site. It sold me, I think that they are on the right track and it is only a matter of time before this protocol is adopted.

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